US Politics

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Walter Almendarez doubts there will be any presents beneath his artificial Christmas tree – not for his daughter, his nephews or anyone else.
Back in March, Almendarez reread an email over and over again, trying to process the news that he had just been let go from Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont, where he had worked for over two decades. He was among more than 200 people fired by the swanky hotel in one fell swoop.
“It was just terrible, the way they did it,” he said.
Widespread local shutdowns made finding a new job practically impossible, and soon, he used up his 401(k) retirement savings just trying to pay the bills.
Like Almendarez, tens of millions of people across America are struggling to make ends meet in an economy devastated by the impact of efforts to control the coronavirus pandemic. Yet at the same time millions of other Americans are enjoying an end-of-year spending spree. The National Retail Federation is projecting that holiday sales will jump between 3.6 and 5.2% this year compared with 2019, with consumers collectively spending well over $750bn.
Those startling discrepancies represent a stark example of how the pandemic has exacerbated America’s already chronic inequalities, amid a widespread awakening to the country’s deep-rooted problems with economic and racial injustice.
“It is definitely something that has increased disparities between white and Black, between those well-off and less well-off – high wage, low wage. All of those things have been absolutely pulling apart,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
During the pandemic, 651 billionaires have accrued more than $1tn in additional wealth – enough to send every American a $3,000 check and then some. But so far, that prosperity has not trickled down to 26.1 million US workers, who in November were still wrestling with direct impacts from the economic downturn, including unemployment and drops in pay.
Those hardships have disproportionately fallen on Black and brown people, who were less likely to be able to work from home even pre-pandemic. In the third quarter of 2020, the unemployment rates for Black people and Latinos were 13.2% and 11.2% respectively, compared with 7.9% for white people.
The slowdown has also caused a “shecession” for women, especially women of color, who have been overburdened with caretaking responsibilities while simultaneously watching their industries flounder.
As Americans struggle to pay rent or buy food, “the worst suffering” people can experience “could really be heading for us as we go into the end of the year”, warned Amanda Fischer, policy director at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a research and grant-making non-profit.
Early into the pandemic, Congress’s Cares Act, which provided $2.2tn in coronavirus aid, proved “one of the most effective anti-poverty tools we’ve seen in American history”, Fischer said. But those provisions were only temporary, and once they vanished, vehicles lined up outside food banks while renters fell months behind on their bills.
Then, when the US economy started to rebound, it did so through a “K-shaped” recovery, benefiting the rich and leaving behind almost everyone else. The stock market – where about 80% of wealth has historically been owned by the top 10% of households – continued to surge, and CEOs projected widespread confidence in the economy, despite many of them expecting to reduce their workforce and let wages stagnate.
High earners also fared well, with the employment rate for those making over $60,000 eventually eclipsing what it had been near the beginning of 2020, according to not-for-profit organization Opportunity Insights. More

Some blame Donald Trump. Others blame social media. And those with longer memories blame Newt Gingrich for carving up America into blue states and red states racked by mutual fear, suspicion and alienation.As speaker of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999, the Republican arguably did more anyone else to sow the seeds of division in Washington. “Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise,” reflected the Atlantic magazine in 2018.But now the 77-year-old party grandee, former history professor and author of three books lionising Trump must contemplate a new chapter in which the ultimate outsider president makes way for Joe Biden, the ultimate insider who has promised healing, unity and a return to pre-Gingrich norms.So where does the Republican party go from here? “I’m guessing, but I think we’re going to be the commonsense reform party,” Gingrich says by phone from Rome, where his wife, Callista, is American ambassador to the Vatican.“You look at the degree to which the bureaucracies don’t work. You look at these Democratic governors who are petty dictators and you look at the challenges facing us – whether it’s a collapsing education system, a collapsing infrastructure, competing with China – and you know that the Democrats, as the party of government employee unions and liberalism, aren’t going to be able to deal with any of this.”As the dust of last month’s elections settled, Marco Rubio, a Republican senator for Florida and potential White House contender in 2024, called for the party to cool its love affair with big corporations. “The future of the party is based on a multiethnic, multiracial working-class coalition,” he told the Axios website.Gingrich believes it is already on the way but, as seems habitual among many in Trump’s orbit, he again pivots to a critique of the other side. “It is becoming that partly because the left is so desperately committed to being the party of very wealthy people living in enclaves, explaining that the police don’t matter because they have their own security guards.”Democrats have also succumbed to a liberal theology, he argues, echoing a rightwing “culture wars” talking point. “What you have, I think, is a Democratic party driven by a cultural belief system that they’re now trying to drive through the school system so they can brainwash the entire next generation if they can get away with it.”A red tsunami beat the blue wave at the polls, he continues, pointing to unexpected Republican gains in the House, victories in state legislatures and various defeats for leftwing causes in state referendums. He singles out for praise Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, whose political action committee dedicated to electing Republican women reaped dividends.“What an amazing job she did. If we were liberals, the covers of all these women’s magazines would be ‘The year of the Republican woman’ but of course, that would be so politically incorrect they couldn’t do it. So the only place that’s truly an anomaly is the presidential race. I think it’s an anomaly so I find myself engaged as a historian every day trying to figure out what in the devil is going on.”Though there is no factual basis for this claim, Gingrich shares Trump’s view that fraud must be the explanation and has said so on the conservative Fox News network. “I don’t see how any reasonable human being can – you can argue over how much it was – but it’s clearly the most in our lifetime,” he insists.Trump’s homeland security department described the election as the most secure in history; his justice department uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud; state officials including Republicans reported no significant irregularities; judges tossed out numerous Trump campaign lawsuits.Yet 18 Republican attorneys general and 126 House Republicans backed a preposterous lawsuit to invalidate millions of votes that was given short shrift by the supreme court. The failed coup was the latest measure of Trumpism’s spread into every organ of the Republican party.But ultimately, Gingrich believes, Trump’s future sway over the party will depend on Trump himself. “He’ll remain a dominant figure for a fairly long period of time, depending on how hard he wants to work at it and how serious it is. People fade pretty quickly if they don’t pay attention. This is a country of enormous restiveness.”Does he expect Trump to run for president again in 2024? “I have no idea,” admits Gingrich, who sought the Republican nomination himself in 2012. “He certainly can look at [former presidents] Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland and then make his own mind up.“If he does run, he’ll be very formidable and part of it’s going to be based on what happens with Biden. If Biden ends up drifting into a really serious recession, the temptation for Trump to run on ‘I told you so, would you like to go back to my economy?’ may be overwhelming.”Biden will inherit overlapping crises of public health, the economy, racial injustice, the climate and democracy. Even in more serene times, incumbent presidents typically suffer losses in the House midway through their first term. With Democrats now holding only a fragile majority, the Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, could claim the speaker’s gavel in 2022.Gingrich, who was a member of Congress for 20 years, muses: “As a historian, I’m pretty cheerful. When [Bill] Clinton won, we picked up 54 seats two years later and when [Barack] Obama won, we picked up 63 seats two years later. I don’t know that the House Democrats get slaughtered on that scale but I’m 99% sure that McCarthy is the next speaker of the House.”Control of the Senate, meanwhile, hinges on two runoff races in Georgia early next month. If Republicans preserve their narrow majority, will Biden be able to work with the majority leader, Mitch McConnell?Gingrich, just seven months younger than the president-elect, says bluntly: “He won’t have any choice. That’s the genius of the American system. But if he wants to get nothing done, he doesn’t have to work with Mitch.“Mitch’s memoir, called The Long Game, really helped me understand him much better. He’s a very long-term player and he’s very self-contained so he’s not intimidated by anything. When he finally forged an alliance with Trump, it was astonishingly productive if you’re a conservative and has given us probably two generations of conservative judges.“Particularly if we win the two Georgia seats, which I think we will, Biden’s going to have to decide, does he want to try to move to being a moderate Democrat, in which case his left will rebel and go crazy, or does he want to stick with the left in which case nothing will get done? And Mitch will be happy with either outcome.”There is a historical rhyme here with the 1990s when Gingrich led a Republican majority against a centrist Democratic president in the shape of Clinton. There may be lessons from that experience for both sides.“An immense amount got done but it’s also why the left hates Clinton. He signed welfare reform, he signed capital gains tax cut, he signed four balanced budgets. It’s nothing to do with his personal behaviour. It’s very much like what happened to the prime minister in Great Britain, Tony Blair: both of them were centrist and both of them were viciously repudiated by their left even as they were popular in the country. It’s just fascinating stuff.”Could Biden, who is making overtures to Republicans and giving little voice to the left in his cabinet, pay a similar price? “He will.”The Clinton v Gingrich years are also often cited as the start of the rot in American democracy. Gingrich was a political pugilist who hurled insults, played to the cameras and set about blowing up the bipartisan consensus. His Contract with America proposals in 1994 helped Republicans win a majority in the House for the first time in four decades.Clinton was impeached for lying under oath and obstructing justice to conceal an extramarital affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich declared it “the most systematic, deliberate obstruction-of-justice cover-up and effort to avoid the truth we have ever seen in American history”.Looking back, does he accept the view that, among the causes of today’s hyperpartisan climate in Washington, he played a role akin to a coal-fired power station?“We had been in the minority for 40 years and unless you had a clear, vivid, polarising message and style, you were going to be in the minority for 40 more years,” he says frankly. “So I did my job, but I also proved over and over again I could work with Clinton. I worked with Democrats all the time. It wasn’t a pathology. It was a professional job.”Today’s dysfunction, rancour and tribalism cannot be pinned on one person alone but has multiple causes that run deeper, acknowledges Allan Lichtman, distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington. But Gingrich certainly had an outsized role.“He was the original polariser,” Lichtman says. “Way back when he was first elected decades ago he criticised the mainstream Republican members of Congress because he thought they were too acquiescent and not engaged in sufficiently vigorous political warfare against the Democrats.“He was also, very importantly, one of the architects of one of the most pivotal elections in modern American history, the midterm elections of 1994, when Republicans took over the House and the Senate for the first time since the first two years of Dwight Eisenhower. That election also greatly contributed to polarisation because it wiped out a lot of moderate southern Democrats and replaced them with very conservative southern Republicans.” More

At the San Joaquin hospital in California’s Central Valley, nurses cover infectious Covid-19 patients with clear, tent-like barriers – or, when those aren’t available, white sheets – as they’re wheeled through the ICU.
“It’s for everybody’s protection,” said Jessica Vasquez, an ICU nurse at the hospital – the sheets ensure that infection doesn’t spread to other patients and medical staff. But like so many of the protocols that the hospital has implemented since the coronavirus pandemic struck, it feels uncanny.
It’s eerie, that these days, she barely talks to her patients – many of whom are too weak to speak. She remembers a man, who – not long before he died of the virus, suddenly grabbed her hand. “He just said, ‘Thank you, thank you.’” None of his loved ones could be there with him.
“I’ve just felt so scared,” she said. “This virus can come, for any of us”
When the virus first hit California, Vasquez was relieved to see the state implement a lockdown – it was the first American state to do so. Back in March, personal protective gear for medical staff was in short supply and hospitals were scrambling to understand the best practices to treat an illness they’d never encountered before, but at least, “people understood this was serious. They stayed inside, if they could – and California avoided the fate of New York and Louisiana.
In that first phase of the pandemic, hospitals in the nation’s most populous state were strained, but they weren’t overwhelmed the way New York hospitals were. They didn’t have to acquire massive refrigerator trucks to serve as mobile morgues for the virus’ victims.
Until now. Less than a fortnight before the Christmas holiday, California distributed 5,000 body bags to the hard-hit regions including Los Angeles, and readied 60 refrigerated trailers. As of Monday, the state has tallied more than 2.1m cases and counted more than 24,000 dead. The ICU capacity in southern California hit 0% by mid-December. Two people were dying of Covid-19 every hour in hard-hit Los Angeles county, where the public health director, Barbara Ferrer, fought back tears as she reported that thousands of “people who were beloved members of their families are not coming back”.
Facing an increasingly dire situation, the state enacted a second lockdown, asking Californians to remain at home throughout the holidays to slow the spread of the virus. But nine months after the first shelter-in-place order, a pandemic-fatigued, frustrated public pushed back.
They balked at leaders’ choice to allow retail shopping and entertainment production to remain open, while most schools were shuttered and families asked to keep away from loved ones. Rightwing protestors gathered outside the homes of public health officials, while progressives demanded that the government prioritize reopening schools over shopping malls. As politicians in Washington debated a second economic relief bill, restaurant owners fretted over whether their businesses could survive a second lockdown. Lines at coronavirus testing sites and food banks grew, as the pandemic devastated ranks of essential workers at farms, grocery stores, garment factories and warehouses. “After months and months, people are broken, and they’re tired,” said Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Francisco. “And they need support.”
The year culminated in a deadly, damning indictment of California – its leaders inability to convincingly enact and enforce public health measures, its structural racism and inbuilt inequalities, its vicious political infighting and its inability to function as a “nation-state”, as governor Gavin Newsom likes to call it, in isolation of of a hostile federal government. More

Donald Trump suffered fresh humiliation on Monday when more than a hundred Republicans joined Democrats in the House of Representatives to override his veto of a $741bn defence bill.
If, as expected, the Senate follows suit later this week, it will be Congress’s first such rebuke of his presidency, which has only three weeks left to run.
During a high stakes day on Capitol Hill, the Democratic-controlled House also voted to boost coronavirus relief payments to $2,000 per person. This was a step endorsed by Trump but is thought unlikely to progress in the Senate.
The National Defense Authorization Act, which funds service members’ pay, overseas military operations and other needs, has been passed by Congress every year since 1967. Trump exercised his veto last week, returning the bill with objections including its proposal to change the names of 10 military bases honouring Confederate leaders.
Trump was also aggrieved that the legislation did not repeal repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects tech companies from legal liability over content posted by their users. The president has accused Facebook and Twitter of political bias against him.
His objections served as the latest loyalty test for Republicans in the aftermath of his election defeat by Joe Biden. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, announced that he would not vote to override Trump’s veto despite supporting the original bill, which passed both chambers of Congress with strong bipartisan backing.
But it was not enough. Some 109 Republicans broke from Trump on Monday and joined Democrats to support the bill. The final tally of 322-87 comfortably reached the two thirds threshold required to override the veto.
Mac Thornberry, the most senior Republican on the House armed services committee, urged colleagues who had supported the bill earlier this month to back it again. “It’s the exact same bill, not a comma has changed,” he said. “I would only ask that as members vote, they put the best interests of the country first. There is no other consideration that should matter.”
Democrat Adam Smith, chair of the committee, said: “It is enormously important that we pass this bill. We did it once. Let’s just do it one more time, and then we can all go home for the year. We can be done, and we can be proud of what we have accomplished.” More

Joe Biden, the US president-elect, complained on Monday that his national security team has run into “obstruction” and “roadblocks” from political leadership at the Pentagon.
The criticism came after the defence department earlier this month suddenly suspended briefings with the Biden transition team, and with Donald Trump still seeking to overturn his election defeat.
“From some agencies, our team received exemplary cooperation,” Biden said in Wilmington, Delaware, after a briefing by his foreign policy advisers. “From others, most notably the Department of Defense, we encountered obstruction from the political leadership of that department.”
Both the defence department and Office of Management and Budget erected “roadblocks”, he added. “Right now we just aren’t getting all of the information that we need from the outgoing administration in key national security areas. It’s nothing short, in my view, of irresponsibility.”
The president-elect, who takes office on 20 January, warned that his team needs “full visibility” into the budget process at the Pentagon “in order to avoid any window of confusion or catch-up that our adversaries may try to exploit”.
The remarks were the latest sign of Biden’s increased willingness to take off the gloves in condemning Trump’s reluctance to take part in a swift and orderly transition. The current president has still not invited his successor to the White House or confirmed his attendance at the inauguration, as is traditional.
Trump fired his defence secretary Mark Esper after the 3 November election, replacing him with Christopher Miller in an acting capacity.
Earlier this month, Biden’s team complained about an abrupt halt in cooperation from the Pentagon. The defence department claimed that meetings had been postponed until January because of a “mutually agreed upon” pause but the transition team insisted that there is no such agreement.
The team also said they had met resistance to requests for information from some Pentagon officials. But a senior defence official told the Reuters news agency that the Pentagon had conducted 163 interviews and 181 requests for information and that it would continue to provide information and meetings.
Trump has refused to acknowledge Biden’s victory, claiming widespread voter fraud for which there is no evidence and suffering dozens of court defeats. His administration only authorised cooperation with Biden on 23 November.
Trump has vowed to make a last stand on 6 January when Congress convenes to certify the electoral college results. Jenna Ellis, a member of his legal team, tweeted on Monday: “President Trump should never concede the election.”
Biden was briefed on Monday by his nominees for secretary of state, defence and homeland security, as well as his incoming national security adviser. He said his team found that agencies “critical to our security have incurred enormous damage” during Trump’s tenure.
“Many of them have been hollowed out in personnel, capacity and in morale. There’s policy processes that have atrophied or have been sidelined to the disrepair of our alliances. It makes it harder for our government to protect the American people.”
Biden’s foreign policy team has been described as a return to experience, expertise and the Barack Obama era, with Tony Blinken nominated for secretary of state, Jake Sullivan for national security adviser and John Kerry in a new role as special presidential envoy for climate. Lloyd Austin is facing a confirmation battle as defence secretary because he is a retired general, potentially undermining the principle of civilian control of the military. More

Donald Trump signed the new Covid-19 stimulus package into law on Sunday night, suddenly giving into pressure from Congress after calling the legislation a “disgrace” days earlier.The $900bn emergency relief bill includes funds to help small businesses, health providers and schools, as well as individuals facing unemployment, eviction and food insecurity.Here is a look at a few of the key provisions in the more than 5,000-page package:Individual aidMost Americans can expect a $600 stimulus check from the government, half the amount distributed to individuals in the spring. The stimulus checks will be made available to adults with annual incomes up to $75,000, with smaller payments available to those who make more. There will also be $600 available per child. This round, families with mixed-immigration status will also qualify for the funds, after US citizens in such families were excluded from collecting the checks in the spring.Trump said he wanted to give Americans $2,000 stimulus checks, a move favored by Democrats. But Republican lawmakers are not expected to support it.Unemployment benefits will also include an extra $300 per week for at least 10 weeks. That is half the amount the government provided from March to August.Covid-19 vaccine and testingThere is $69bn included in the bill to aid Covid-19 vaccine distribution, contact tracing and testing. This includes $9bn to healthcare providers and $4.5bn to mental health services. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said last week that more than a million people in the US had received the first dose of the vaccine – 10 days after Covid-19 vaccine administration began in the country.Small business aidThe package extends the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which provided roughly $525bn in aid to more than five million businesses after it was enacted in the spring. Loans of up to $2m will be available to small, hard-hit businesses and $15bn of the funding is dedicated to live venues such as movie theaters and museums.PPP, which ended in August, was criticized for its complexity and loopholes and the $284bn extension attempts to address those issues. Congress members said they attempted to better target the funds after Black-owned businesses reported difficulties accessing the loans. Businesses have until 31 March to apply for the loans, but it is not clear when the application process will open.School fundingEducational institutions will get $82bn, with $54bn for public schools, which provide free education to children in kindergarten through high school. This is roughly four times more than what Congress provided to public schools in its spring economic relief package.State governments are facing budget deficits because of falling personal income tax and sales tax revenue, leaving public schools vulnerable. The promised funding still falls short of requests by public school groups, but president-elect Joe Biden has promised to direct more help to schools.The rest of the money will be directed to colleges and universities ($23bn), an education emergency relief fund ($4bn) and Native American schools ($1bn).Rental assistanceState and local governments will be able to distribute funds to people who may be facing eviction under a $25bn first-of-its-kind rental assistance program. The assistance can be used for rent, back rent, utilities and other related expenses.The bill also extends the federal eviction moratorium by a month. The moratorium is limited and has allowed evictions to continue in certain circumstances.Broadband infrastructureAt a time when millions of Americans are working from home, attending school and seeing their doctors online, Congress is providing $7bn to expand high-speed internet access. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimated that 21 million Americans lack high-speed internet access but other studies have estimated the number at close to 42 million.About half of the money will be used for a $50 per month broadband benefit to help cover internet bills for low-income families. Funds will also be used to help with broadband issues for communities near historically Black colleges and universities, the federal government’s telehealth program and rural broadband. More

Public health experts are cautioning the US to brace for another Covid-19 surge following holiday travel, as the virus continues to spread unchecked throughout the country. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials said the agency had screened 1.28 million travelers at US airports nationwide on Sunday – marking the highest number of air travelers since mid-March, Reuters reported. While this is approximately 50% fewer passengers than the same day of 2019, Sunday marked the sixth day over the previous 10 days that saw more than one million people traveling through airports alone.“And the reason I’m concerned and my colleagues in public health are concerned also is that we very well might see a post-seasonal, in the sense of Christmas, New Year’s, surge, and, as I have described it, as a surge upon a surge, because, if you look at the slope, the incline of cases that we have experienced as we have gone into the late fall and soon-to-be-early winter, it is really quite troubling,” top US infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci said Sunday on CNN.“We are really at a very critical point.”There have been 19,145,982 cases in the US and 333,140 deaths, Johns Hopkins University’s most recent data indicate; Tennessee and California have become the new US centers, with 119.7 and 95.7 people infected per 100,000, respectively.New York City and state, which got coronavirus under control after a deadly spring, has also seen an uptick in cases. On Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a 7.07% positivity rate for the city’s seven-day average.Some estimates predict that US deaths could total 500,000 by spring.US officials are also closely monitoring a coronavirus mutation detected in parts of the UK. While they say that the strain is no more likely to result in serious illness – nor more likely to resist vaccines – it appears to be more contagious.Starting Monday, travelers entering America from the UK must show a negative Covid-19 test within three days of their flight following a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mandate last week, AP noted.Health officials in Los Angeles said they are testing for the new mutation as COVID-19 cases continue to rise in California. “I wouldn’t be surprised that it’s already here,” Dr.Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, told ABC-7 News.Meanwhile, the vaccine rollout – which has already seen setbacks and controversies – is not expected to happen widely for several months, making near-term relief seem all the more uncertain. While the US goal under Operation Warp Speed was expected to provide vaccine doses to 20 million by year’s end, only around 1.9 million people have received a jab, per CNBC and KVIA.Allegations of fraudulent vaccine distribution have already emerged. New York state authorities have announced a criminal probe into one healthcare provider, alleging that it “may have fraudulently obtained Covid-19 vaccine, transferred it to facilities in other parts of the state in violation of state guidelines and diverted it to members of the public,” according to the New York Post.President-elect Joe Biden has also warned that the US pandemic is poised to get far worse before it gets better.“One thing I promise you about my leadership during this crisis: I’m going to tell it to you straight. I’m going to tell you the truth. And here’s the simple truth: our darkest days in the battle against Covid are ahead of us, not behind us,” Biden recently said. More